A Salute to Fannie Flagg

I was working at a bookstore when the 1992 screen version of Fried Green Tomatoes was released. Naturally at the time there was a reissue of the novel, which had been written in 1987 by Fannie Flagg (Patricia Neal, b. 1944). So I shelved and displayed scores of copies of that book over a period of many months. The reason I begin this post with this dull and unimportant information has to do with something more significant: somehow, I didn’t connect the author’s name with the Fannie Flagg I had seen on television hundreds of times previously.

Isn’t that strange? It’s not that I thought about it consciously. It’s more like whatever auto-pilot backup system my brain was working on as I performed my busy work didn’t marry the two facts. If I thought about it at all, as I must have done upon glancing at the book cover, the voice in my head probably went, “H’m! Must be a different Fannie Flagg than the saucy, perky Southern gal on Match Game.” But it wasn’t.

Nothin’ ’bout

If Fannie Flagg were just an author, it’s unlikely that I’d have dedicated a post to her. Though I have over 750 posts in my “books and authors” section, I am extremely stringent in my literary tastes. For the most part I am uninterested in contemporary bestsellers. The novelist I wrote about most recently here was Theodore Dreiser. But Flagg was also in theatre and variety television, and those add up to BINGO on Travalanche. And the whole multi-faceted package of this artist is pretty dazzling.

Flagg grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, in what we may now call the Once and Future Old South. The young nelle actually competed for Miss Alabama; she won a year’s worth of acting classes. Still a teenager, she co-hosted a local morning show at a local Birmingham tv station.

In the early 1960s, Flagg moved to New York and began writing and performing in comedy sketches at cabarets. (One was Upstairs at the Downstairs which we’ll be writing more about in a few days). Since there was already a Patricia Neal in the biz (A Face in the Crowd, Hud) she gave herself a professional handle inspired by the many vaudeville Fannies (Fanny Brice, Fanny Davenport, Fannie Ward). The “Flagg” tag strikes me as satirical; Southerners take their flags very seriously, and sophisticated satire was exploding in cities all across America at the time.

Lifting a prop car to blow the minds of bystanders on Candid Camera

Allen Funt spied one of her performances and cast her as a regular on Candid Camera and that is how she made it to the big leagues. Isn’t that crazy? This led to The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and The Merv Griffin Show, and of course Match Game, where she was a quick-witted fixture for around two decades.

This Superman/ Ronald McDonald jersey with plaid bow tie oughtta turn a few heads!

In the late ’60s and early ’70s you could see her on The Jackie Gleason Show, Kraft Music Hall,The Joey Bishop Show, Hollywood Squares, and many other game, variety, and talk shows. She was also one of the primary writers on Dolly Parton’s 1987 variety series Dolly.

Flagg was also an actress. Bob Rafelson was a fan, casting her in Five Easy Pieces (1970) and Stay Hungry (1976). On TV she was a regular on the series The New Dick Van Dyke Show (1971-73) and Harper Valley PTA (1981-82) and a guest star on Love American Style, Wonder Woman, Fernwood 2Night, Love Boat etc, and the TV movie Sex and the Married Woman (1977), directed by Jack Arnold. Some of her later theatrical movies in front of the camera included Joan Rivers’Rabbit Test (1978), Grease (1978), My Best Friend is a Vampire (1987), and Crazy in Alabama (1999).

Flagg actually had the lead role in the independent film Some of My Best Friends Are…(1971) with Candy Darling and Rue McClanahan, an early public expression of her lesbian identity. For years she was the romantic partner of actress Susan Flannery, best known from the movie Towering Inferno (1974) and the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful. In the mid ’70s, she lived for a time with author Rita Mae Brown. The latter relationship seems relevant to the fact that Flagg pursued her own serious literary career not long afterward. Her first novel, Coming Attractions (1981) was retitled Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man when it was re-released in 1992. Then came Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (1987), which became the hit 1992 film, for which Flagg co-wrote the screenplay. Since then, she has been primarily known as an author, with about another dozen books to her credit.

(For a related post from just a couple of days ago, see my squib on the late, great Gaillard Sartain, who appeared in Fried Green Tomatoes).

For more on show biz history consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.